How, then, should a new edition of the Apadāna be edited and presented? Firstly, the minimum requirement for a scholarly edition ought to be complete transparency regarding the manner in which the editor has produced his or her text. This includes the provision of detailed information on all witnesses, a statement regarding the textual form the editor has attempted to reproduce and an explanation of the editing methodology used. As demonstrated in § 3.6, most existing editions of Pāli texts provide little to none of this information and thereby conceal the editor’s significant role in shaping the textual form.
Secondly, while editorial intervention into the received text ought to be kept to a minimum, the published text needs to be accessible to the majority of Pāli readers. In her critique of PTS editions, Balbir (2009: 16) suggested that the facsimile edition38 might be a suitable alternative to the eclectic edition, which she calls the “critical edition”.39 However, it is likely that the readership of such a
37 As quoted in § 3.6.1, a similar claim was made by von Hinüber (1983: 76) regarding the King
Chulalongkorn series.
38 A facsimile edition consists of facsimile reproductions of each page of a manuscript.
39 I have avoided the term “critical edition” in this thesis because it has no widely accepted and
unambiguous definition. Kelemen (2009: 73) stated that a critical edition is a reconstruction of an ideal text by means of textual criticism. Using this definition, the critical edition is therefore not identical to the eclectic edition. For instance, the semi-diplomatic edition, that is, one which
publication would be limited to a small group of specialists who are able to read the script in question, who are comfortable reading Pāli without spaces between words and who are capable of identifying and coping with the many scribal errors found throughout most Pāli manuscripts.40 Similarly, in another critique of PTS editions, Masefield (2009: 3) advocated a variant of the diplomatic edition:
I am rapidly coming to the view that whenever we transliterate a manuscript, of which we have more than one ‘copy,’ we should resist all temptation at producing a further, ‘critical’ [i.e. eclectic] edition, and rather select—if necessarily at random—only one those [sic] manuscripts and use this as a base text, simply noting any variant readings contained in the others by consigning these to the footnotes. In this way, we will be preserving at least one genuine version of the text, free of our own impositions, for other scholars to reflect upon in the future.
Masefield (2009: 3–4) further suggested that such an edition should consist of an unbroken string of transliterated graphemes, either with or without an additional transliteration in which the editor has intervened to separate individual words with spaces. While such an edition would be slightly more accessible than a facsimile edition, its readership is still likely to be confined to a small number of highly trained scholars. The quality of text contained in Pāli manuscripts is extremely variable and if the manuscript in question is to be selected at random, as Masefield suggests, then it is reasonably likely that its text would contain a large number of scribal errors. The reader would need to be able to identify these errors and constantly refer to the variant readings contained in what would surely need to
reproduces the text of a single witness with editorial changes, could also be regarded as a critical edition.
40 Instead, facsimile editions are more appropriate for Pāli works which are preserved in only one or
two manuscripts, or for historically significant manuscripts, e.g. the oldest known Pāli palm leaf manuscript, which dates to the eighth or ninth century (von Hinüber 1991).
be a very swollen critical apparatus.41 I would therefore suggest that a new scholarly edition of the Apadāna should be represented in Roman script, contain spaces between words and include a restrained usage of punctuation.42 It is true that some of these features involve subjective judgment on the part of the editor; however, relatively minor text critical decisions such as these are surely best made by a competent editor, rather than the general reader who may not be sufficiently trained to make the most appropriate judgments.43 Of course, more significant editorial interventions, such as conjectural emendations, need to be very clearly marked as being departures from the received text.44
As previously stated, a scholarly edition ought to include a statement regarding the textual form the editor has attempted to reproduce. At least eleven complete printed editions of the Apadāna have already been published.45 The
41 It is also problematic that Masefield appears to draw a sharp division between the “genuine
versions” contained in South and Southeast Asian manuscripts and the, presumably “non-genuine”, text of an edited printed edition. As with printed editions, manuscripts are sometimes a mixture of readings from multiple exemplars and their scribes also sometimes made silent emendations to the text.
42 See § 4.1.1 for details on the punctuation used in the edition contained in this thesis.
43 For a similar reason, it would not be particularly appropriate to represent the Apadāna via a
synoptic edition, that is, one in which the readings from each witness are given in full side-by-side and in which no attempt is made to present a single ideal text. The number of extant Apadāna manuscripts would also make such an edition very voluminous and would compare unfavourably to, for example, the successful synoptic edition of the Jambūpatisūtra (Pakdeekham 2009) which presents the text of only six witnesses.
44 Olivelle (1998b), for instance, discussed the negative repercussions of poorly labeled conjectural
emendations in the early editions of the Upaniṣads. In editions of Greek and Latin texts, it is common practice to use <angle brackets> to indicate conjectural additions and {braces} to indicate conjectural deletions (Maas 1958: 22; West 1973: 80).
45 Namely, the editions from the Buddhajayantī Tripiṭaka series, Cambodian Tipiṭaka series,
Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series, Dayyaraṭṭhassa Saṅgītitepiṭaka 2530 Buddhavasse series, Hanthawaddy Press series, Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka Buddhavasse 2500 series, Nālandā Devanāgarī Pāli series, PTS series and Syāmraṭṭhassa Tepiṭaka series; Buddhadatta 1929–1930; and ဦးခိင် 1917. As far as I am aware, the edition from the Simon Hewavitarne Bequest series is incomplete and consists of only
Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka edition, for example, contains very few errors from an orthographical or grammatical standpoint and is therefore suitable for the general reader who wishes to become acquainted with apadāna stories. Another printed edition of the Apadāna in which its editor has primarily attempted to produce a polished and highly “readable” text would be of little benefit to Pāli studies. What has not yet been attempted is an edition which is principally concerned with the historical development of the text, via a close study of its extant witnesses, and which presents the earliest possible textual form as the base text. If such an edition is possible, not only would it make a valuable contribution to the study of the Apadāna, but it would be of importance to the study of Pāli literature in general.
The final consideration is which editing methodology to adopt. As noted throughout § 3.6, in most editions of Pāli texts the editor(s) have provided little to no information on their editing methodology and in such instances the reader is likely to assume, often perhaps correctly, that the editor(s) in fact had no clear methodology and simply choose the readings which most appealed to their own personal predilections. Some PTS editions explicitly state that this is what was done (e.g. Feer 1884: xiii). Needless to say, this is not an appropriate method by which to produce a scholarly edition, particularly if the goal is to represent the earliest possible textual form. Earlier in this chapter, a number of editing methodologies was surveyed in order to demonstrate the diversity of options available for editing a text represented by multiple witnesses. Are any of these approaches suitable for a new edition of the Apadāna?
In § 3.2 it was noted that diplomatic editions based upon a Masoretic witness have been particularly popular for publications of Hebrew scripture. This is, in part, due to the privileged place that the Masoretic Text has had within Judaism from a reasonably early period and the existence of several Masoretic manuscripts which were copied approximately one thousand years ago (Tov 2012: 44–46). Within Theravāda Buddhism, however, there is no particular text type or set of manuscripts which practicing communities agree is authoritative and, in the case of the
one volume of the projected two volumes. For further details on some of these publications, see § 4.1.2.1.
Apadāna, there are no known complete manuscripts which are especially old. Therefore, no single witness stands out as being particularly suitable for providing the base text of a diplomatic edition of the Apadāna. Alternatively, the problems associated with selecting a manuscript at random to provide the base text of an edition of a Pāli text have been described above.
In § 3.3 it was noted that most modern editions of New Testament scripture have been produced using eclecticism, particularly reasoned eclecticism which takes external evidence into consideration. The external evidence provided by New Testament witnesses is particularly powerful because of the short interval separating composition dates and the earliest extant manuscripts, and because research has revealed the key features of the primary text types into which early witnesses may be divided. In the case of the Apadāna, however, external evidence is weak. Since our earliest extant manuscripts postdate the text’s composition by a very significant period of time, differences between the copying dates of almost all extant manuscripts are not particularly significant.46 Furthermore, so little research has been conducted into the features of the main text types of Pāli manuscripts that we are not yet able to judge a reading on the basis of the text type to which it belongs. Therefore, if the Apadāna were to be edited eclectically, the main type of evidence used would be internal evidence, meaning that the text would be edited using thoroughgoing eclecticism. The main danger of such an approach is that, if the evidence is not strong enough, the resultant text might be an artificial new creation rather than something which truly represents an early textual form.
In § 3.4 it was commented that Greek and Latin classical texts have most often been edited using the stemmatic approach. Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament have been preserved in thousands of manuscripts and it is therefore inconceivable that their witnesses could be manually arranged into detailed stemmas. However, the reasonably small number of manuscripts in which most Greek and Latin classical texts are preserved is well suited for stemmatic analysis. Stemmatic editing might be similarly appropriate for the Apadāna, since the
46 The primary exception being the Apadāna fragment from Vat Lai Hin, which dates to
number of its known extant manuscripts is not exceptionally high. Additionally, the goal of this approach is compatible with the editing goal proposed earlier in this section, namely, the reconstruction of the Apadāna’s earliest possible textual form. Of course, the success of the stemmatic approach is inversely proportional to the extent to which a text’s witnesses are contaminated. The transmission history of Pāli literature is, as yet, poorly understood and therefore the frequency and extent of contamination found in Pāli manuscripts is unknown. However, a small number of Pāli texts have been successfully edited using the stemmatic approach, including the Upāsakajanālaṅkāra (Saddhatissa 1965), Dīghanikāyaṭīkā Līnatthappakāsinī (de Silva 1970) and Aṅguttaranikāyaṭīkā Catuttha Sāratthamañjūsā (Pecenko 1996– 1999).47 The stemma of the Upāsakajanālaṅkāra witnesses indicates that one manuscript drew from two exemplars; however, the stemmas in the latter two publications do not depict contamination in the branches of manuscript transmission. It is therefore possible that a similarly low level of contamination is present in manuscripts of the Apadāna. If some manuscripts are found to be heavily contaminated and resist a strict stemmatic analysis, it might be possible to group these into a single cluster and treat them as a whole unit within the stemma, as per the adaption of the stemmatic approach used for editing several Sanskrit texts (see § 3.5). It is therefore recommended that a new scholarly edition of the Apadāna be edited stemmatically.
47 For sake of completeness, it should be noted that some Pāli scholars do not believe that stemmatic
editing is appropriate for Pāli literature. In her critique of PTS editions, Balbir (2009: 6) rather strangely commented, “The search for archetypes, i.e. the oldest copy of a text, which has been applied to the manuscripts of Classical Antiquity, is certainly rather vain and perhaps off the mark given the modes of diffusions of Buddhist literature, the wide geographical regions where the texts were copied, and the profusion of manuscripts”. That Pāli literature has spread out over wide geographical regions via numerous manuscripts is no reason to abandon the stemmatic approach. In fact, such a situation is likely to minimise contamination and thereby favour successful stemmatic editing.